Capturing values-based legacies of community-led development with GPI in Bhutan
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Brighton
Department Name: Sch of Computing, Engineering & Maths
Abstract
This project is the fruit of a new partnership between the University of Brighton and GPIAtlantic, which aims to demonstrate the usefulness and relevance of values-based approaches to evaluating cultural legacies of projects for asset-based community development. The project will transfer approaches developed in the 'Starting from Values: Evaluating Intangible Legacies' Connected Communities project to an established programme.
The project will embed values-based approaches to identifying legacies within the Stories of Amazing Resilience (SOAR) and Gothkad (Happiness) Village projects led by GPIAtlantic and its local partner in Bhutan, the Youth Development Fund (YDF). These projects are part of the wider programme of developing Gross National Happiness pioneered in Bhutan.
In doing so, we will train Canadian and Bhutanese youth leaders who are involved in delivering action research projects for community wellbeing, and co-develop an approach to evaluating legacies of these projects in Bhutan.
The project also aims to use this practical example as a case for the usefulness of the approach in other regions, and to develop a deep, mutual partnership with GPIAtlantic, a global leader in indicators for development. Our community partner will also facilitate the transfer of this learning into an established global network of policy-makers, funders and assessors of genuine progress and wellbeing.
The project will embed values-based approaches to identifying legacies within the Stories of Amazing Resilience (SOAR) and Gothkad (Happiness) Village projects led by GPIAtlantic and its local partner in Bhutan, the Youth Development Fund (YDF). These projects are part of the wider programme of developing Gross National Happiness pioneered in Bhutan.
In doing so, we will train Canadian and Bhutanese youth leaders who are involved in delivering action research projects for community wellbeing, and co-develop an approach to evaluating legacies of these projects in Bhutan.
The project also aims to use this practical example as a case for the usefulness of the approach in other regions, and to develop a deep, mutual partnership with GPIAtlantic, a global leader in indicators for development. Our community partner will also facilitate the transfer of this learning into an established global network of policy-makers, funders and assessors of genuine progress and wellbeing.
Planned Impact
Through the project, staff and interns from GPIAtlantic will be trained in the values-based approach to evaluating the legacies of their projects and programmes. They are expected to use these approaches in related projects that they deliver in the Mekong, India and in Canada in following years - the project includes time to specifically ensure this can take place. Key staff and youth from the Bhutanese Youth Development Agency (YDF) will also be trained, and can then cascade this within their youth leaders' network and programmes within Bhutan.
With over a decade of experience working with the Bhutanese government to develop the Gross National Happiness index, and working with local partners in the delivery of community development programmes, GPIAtlantic has strong connections with Bhutanese government officials, national NGOs and local chapters of international NGOs such as UNICEF, the World Bank and UNDP. GPIAtlantic also have a long-standing collaboration with the Canadian International Development Agency, are well established in the international development community, and are world leaders in developing alternative assessments for community wellbeing and resilience (e.g. they have led the development of the Genuine Progress Index and its application at regional and national levels). Thus, the outcomes of the work delivered through this Follow-on Funding scheme will be widely disseminated within these networks and insights will be shared through face-to-face meetings in Bhutan and Canada in the later stages of the project. Furthermore, we expect that the project will provide a platform of work and real case examples that can be further developed into a rigorous and accessible approach that can bridge local to regional indicators for Genuine Progress - an identified gap that exists worldwide. This work would thus benefit an international community of practitioners and policy-makers engaged in community development and interested in using and further enhancing existing measures of genuine progress (GPI for instance).
GPIAtlantic and YDF will also engage with national Bhutanese media (press, television and radio) who are also expected to benefit from the project. The outcomes from the project, and audio-visual content that we aim to produce will be used as much needed content in media streams, and examples of successful community development projects.
Partners have carefully considered benefits for all participants and beneficiaries of local communities involved in the project. In particular, Young Volunteers in Action youth from Bhutan and residents in Gothkad, or 'Happiness' villages will benefit from clarifying and communicating the legacies for the community development work carried out in these locations, in doing so strengthening these very legacies. In addition, community members will have more control over the data collected in such evaluation processes, and youth leaders involved in the project will gain new skills in evaluation and values-based approaches which they will be able to apply to a range of project contexts.
With over a decade of experience working with the Bhutanese government to develop the Gross National Happiness index, and working with local partners in the delivery of community development programmes, GPIAtlantic has strong connections with Bhutanese government officials, national NGOs and local chapters of international NGOs such as UNICEF, the World Bank and UNDP. GPIAtlantic also have a long-standing collaboration with the Canadian International Development Agency, are well established in the international development community, and are world leaders in developing alternative assessments for community wellbeing and resilience (e.g. they have led the development of the Genuine Progress Index and its application at regional and national levels). Thus, the outcomes of the work delivered through this Follow-on Funding scheme will be widely disseminated within these networks and insights will be shared through face-to-face meetings in Bhutan and Canada in the later stages of the project. Furthermore, we expect that the project will provide a platform of work and real case examples that can be further developed into a rigorous and accessible approach that can bridge local to regional indicators for Genuine Progress - an identified gap that exists worldwide. This work would thus benefit an international community of practitioners and policy-makers engaged in community development and interested in using and further enhancing existing measures of genuine progress (GPI for instance).
GPIAtlantic and YDF will also engage with national Bhutanese media (press, television and radio) who are also expected to benefit from the project. The outcomes from the project, and audio-visual content that we aim to produce will be used as much needed content in media streams, and examples of successful community development projects.
Partners have carefully considered benefits for all participants and beneficiaries of local communities involved in the project. In particular, Young Volunteers in Action youth from Bhutan and residents in Gothkad, or 'Happiness' villages will benefit from clarifying and communicating the legacies for the community development work carried out in these locations, in doing so strengthening these very legacies. In addition, community members will have more control over the data collected in such evaluation processes, and youth leaders involved in the project will gain new skills in evaluation and values-based approaches which they will be able to apply to a range of project contexts.
Publications
| Description | Collaborators and participants from Thailand, Bhutan, Cambodia, Myanmar, Canada and the UK have benefitted from the project in the following ways: • The Thai Volunteer Service TVS youth leaders and key staff have a new approach to evaluating legacies of their projects. • The workshop gave participants a common vocabulary to speak about values and values-based processes and has given them new tools to integrate into their work. • A number of participants noted that the tools they acquired in the workshop would be very relevant to their work with youth and intended to apply them in their contexts. • Participants appreciated the discussion of ethics in participatory research and said that this would influence how they carried out research in future. • Participants stated that they had been very inspired by the workshop and field visits and this would provide additional motivation and food for thought in their personal lives and their work. • Both workshop and field visits stimulated reflection about the role of values within participants' own work and that of their organisations. One leader of an organisation (Myanmar 2) expressed the intention to use what he had learned to work with the staff of his organisation to rethink their overall approach. • The workshop and field visits allowed participants to explore the concept of 'happiness' in some depth, noting its encapsulation of wellbeing, simplicity, self-determination, relationships and spirituality. Several people said that they would incorporate happiness more explicitly into their work and noted that the GNH framework integrated with the value-based approaches would serve to effectively implement this objective. Participants from one organisation (Myanmar) expressed an intention to use GNH domains to frame their forthcoming assembly. • Bhutanese participants who work with GNH as a national strategy said that the workshop and field visits had stimulated them to think more deeply about GNH. The values lens served as a vehicle to reinvigorate the concept. Longer-term benefits: • Project beneficiaries and participants within villages may gain insights into their values and the legacies of these projects. • GPI Atlantic research staff and volunteers, as well as TVS youth leaders, will develop expertise in using a new values-based tool for community-level assessment of their projects. • GPI Atlantic and TVS may be able to demonstrate the cultural legacies of the GNH youth movement and GNH aligned community initiatives to other organisations, funders, governments by lending authority to different forms of knowledge. • GPI Atlantic has the ingredients for developing a new approach that can bridge community and regional-level assessments of community wellbeing. • The University of Brighton will benefit from wider impacts of their work and insights into the usefulness of this approach for practitioners in community-led development. • The benefits for GPI Atlantic and their partners in Bhutan, Thailand and other countries is key to enhancing the impact of the work by ensuring continued and further use of values-based approaches in their own projects in these and other regions as well as dissemination to key development agencies and organisations. This is key to potentially transforming current approaches to assessing progress at the community level globally and community partners adopting a new mechanism for evidencing the benefits of asset-based community development approaches and helping to move towards such approaches being standard 'development' practice in future. In addition, ensuring real benefit for all community partners and participants in their programmes is an important dimension of our ethical commitment to doing research with communities for mutual benefit. Furthermore, it speaks to an ethical question which the original research on legacies seeks to address, namely shifting authority so that communities themselves can take charge of evaluating the cultural legacies of their programmes and collect their own data. |
| Exploitation Route | This work shows that our values-based approaches are ready to be presented in a form for others to use for: - community-based development - international development, community-based - by development agencies anywhere All respondents mentioned they would like further support to develop the methods they learned in the workshop, specifically: • Develop fuzzy framework(s) • Our organizational core value and shared values and set the practice indicator. • Fuzzy Frame work • Given an opportunity, I would like to slowly apply all the methods that I have learned during the workshop in the programs/activities that i am involved in. During the whole workshop, I was more interested in value elicitation methods that we learned such as photo elicitation, storytelling, drawing, fuzzy framework, etc. I would like to have more information on this method if possible and try and implement it in the projects/programs. Further training was identified for the following areas: • peace building and negotiation • Value into practices. • And GPI orientation and ways to develop index and indicators. • any topic which would help in training Youth and creating Gakidh Village in the community • As I have mentioned above, I would like to know more on the values elicitation methods |
| Sectors | Education,Environment,Healthcare,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://www.wevalue.org |
| Description | We have worked hand in hand in this project with our partner, GPIAtlantic, and collaborator, Thailand Volunteer Service (TVS), and their affiliated organisations in Myanmar, India and Bhutan. The approach as co-developed is already in use by the TVS to consider legacies of some areas of their work, and by some of the civil society groups that they support for the same. Practitioners in Myanmar and Bhutan have said they will try to use it there. • This project is enhancing and extending internationally the pathways to impact identified in the 'Starting from Values: Evaluating Intangible legacies' project by working with a new partner to demonstrate the relevance of the values-based approach to capturing legacies in the context of asset-based community development based in principles of action research. • The project is taking place in a context where multiple languages co-exist and translation and transposing have been needed, which has demonstrated the usefulness of the approach in a most challenging environment. • The project was designed to take advantage of the networked structure of GPI Atlantic as an organisation as well as of the projects that they deliver, ensuring the work delivered through this project has a broader international reach than the specific case of Thailand. Collaborators and participants have benefitted from the project in the following ways: • TVS youth leaders and key staff have a new approach to evaluating legacies of their projects. • The workshop gave participants a common vocabulary to speak about values and values-based processes and has given them new tools to integrate into their work. • A number of participants noted that the tools they acquired in the workshop would be very relevant to their work with youth and intended to apply them in their contexts. • Participants appreciated the discussion of ethics in participatory research and said that this would influence how they carried out research in future. • Participants stated that they had been very inspired by the workshop and field visits and this would provide additional motivation and food for thought in their personal lives and their work. • Both workshop and field visits stimulated reflection about the role of values within participants' own work and that of their organisations. One leader of an organisation (Myanmar 2) expressed the intention to use what he had learned to work with the staff of his organisation to rethink their overall approach. • The workshop and field visits allowed participants to explore the concept of 'happiness' in some depth, noting its encapsulation of wellbeing, simplicity, self-determination, relationships and spirituality. Several people said that they would incorporate happiness more explicitly into their work and noted that the GNH framework integrated with the value-based approaches would serve to effectively implement this objective. Participants from one organisation (Myanmar) expressed an intention to use GNH domains to frame their forthcoming assembly. • Bhutanese participants who work with GNH as a national strategy said that the workshop and field visits had stimulated them to think more deeply about GNH. The values lens served as a vehicle to reinvigorate the concept. Longer-term benefits: • Project beneficiaries and participants within villages may gain insights into their values and the legacies of these projects. • GPI Atlantic research staff and volunteers, as well as TVS youth leaders, will develop expertise in using a new values-based tool for community-level assessment of their projects. • GPI Atlantic and TVS may be able to demonstrate the cultural legacies of the GNH youth movement and GNH aligned community initiatives to other organisations, funders, governments by lending authority to different forms of knowledge. • GPI Atlantic has the ingredients for developing a new approach that can bridge community and regional-level assessments of community wellbeing. • The University of Brighton will benefit from wider impacts of their work and insights into the usefulness of this approach for practitioners in community-led development. • The benefits for GPI Atlantic and their partners in Bhutan, Thailand and other countries is key to enhancing the impact of the work by ensuring continued and further use of values-based approaches in their own projects in these and other regions as well as dissemination to key development agencies and organisations. This is key to potentially transforming current approaches to assessing progress at the community level globally and community partners adopting a new mechanism for evidencing the benefits of asset-based community development approaches and helping to move towards such approaches being standard 'development' practice in future. In addition, ensuring real benefit for all community partners and participants in their programmes is an important dimension of our ethical commitment to doing research with communities for mutual benefit. Furthermore, it speaks to an ethical question which the original research on legacies seeks to address, namely shifting authority so that communities themselves can take charge of evaluating the cultural legacies of their programmes and collect their own data. Follow-on impacts: this project established that the semi-anthropological approach of the WeValue approach being used, could in fact be taken over by trained local non-governmental or social researchers, to be used effectively in completely new cultures and in another language. That finding was taken forward even further in later work in 2019 where Brighton researchers developed ways to construct local materials of the WeValue approach in villages in Nigeria and in Botswana. These allowed environmental applications to move forward, and enabled deep and meaningful participation of local people, and have been now published in recent papers. Effectively, the understanding of the potential use of the approach as a valid anthropological method has been made clear, and further development of that will continue, with collaborations with Hong Kong University. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2019 |
| Sector | Environment,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal,Policy & public services |
| Description | GCRF Action against Stunting Hub |
| Amount | £18,271,185 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | MR/S01313X/1 |
| Organisation | Medical Research Council (MRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 02/2019 |
| End | 02/2024 |
| Description | GPI Atlantic & UOB co-designing and co-delivering in Thailand for GNH movement legacy |
| Organisation | GPI Atlantic |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | This was a partnership where the two partners designed and co-delivered events in Thailand. The Brighton team provided expertise on the values-based approach that was being developed to provide a lens for looking at legacy, but from inception through to planning and implementation stages the two partners worked together to produce new work and approaches. |
| Collaborator Contribution | GPIAtlantic provide expertise of working with all the overseas collaborators involved; experience with the Gross national Happiness legacies and past events and current events; local knowledge in Thailand; knowledge of how the results of the project could be taken forward for wider dissemination with development agencies.But from inception through to planning and implementation stages the two partners worked together to produce new work and approaches. |
| Impact | Final Report: Capturing values-based legacies of community-led development with GPI in Bhutan available at https://converis.brighton.ac.uk/converis/ Multi-discipinary: evaluation; international development; geography; sustainbility; design |
| Start Year | 2015 |
| Description | GPI Atlantic & UOB co-designing and co-delivering in Thailand for GNH movement legacy |
| Organisation | Thai Volunteer Service |
| Country | Thailand |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | WE BROUGHT IN EXPERTISE IN A NOVEL VALUES-BASED APPROACH TO IDENTIFY LEGACIES. |
| Collaborator Contribution | THEY BROUGHT IN EXPERTISE IN WORKING WITH COMMUNITY GROUPS IN THAILAND AND NEARBY COUNTRIES, INCLUDING BHUTAN. |
| Impact | Values-based indicators for Genuine Progress:Capturing Values-Based Legacies of Community-Led Development with GPI in Thailand |
| Start Year | 2016 |
| Description | Field work in Thailand |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The two main partners met over two weeks to i)co-design values based-approaches and experience with development agencies and projects involved in the Gross National Happiness movement ii) introduce leaders in the Thai Volunteer Service and other agencies affiliated with GNH with values-based approach concepts, and thus to explore the legacies of the GNH movement on their own organisations iii) and thus to co-deign with them an approach to use in their local contexts for examining legacies iv) working in two villages to explore locally perceived legacies of GNH movement v)plan two further concrete legacy explorations with local groups in Thailand |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |